Experts Study Rare African Parchment In Search Of Clues About The Evolution Of Writing

The first page of Vail manuscript MS17817 from the British Library.  According to a linguistic expert, “Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries.” (The British Library, CC0/Zenger)

Experts have studied a rare African parchment in their search for clues about the evolution of writing, which they say has evolved “to become simpler and more efficient.”

“To arrive at this insight, they turned to a rare African writing system that has fascinated outsiders since the early 19th century,” the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany said in a statement, adding that the world’s first writing occurred more 5,000 years ago in the Middle East before it was reinvented in China and Central America.